Type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Venture capital |
Founded | 2011 |
Founder | Chamath Palihapitiya |
Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, United States |
Key people | Ray Ko, Steve Trieu, Andrew Artz, Jay Zaveri |
Products | Investments |
Website | Official website |
Social Capital, formerly known as Social+Capital Partnership, is a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. The firm specializes in technology startups, providing seed funding, venture capital, and private equity. [1] [2]
The firm has "stood out strategically", according to Fortune, "with a focus on ... healthcare, financial services and education ... when those fields were ... neglected by the VC community." [1]
Social Capital was founded in 2011 by Chamath Palihapitiya, who had previously worked at Facebook. [1] Mamoon Hamid and Ted Maidenberg also joined the firm that year as General Partners. [3] [4]
In January 2015, Fortune reported that Kleiner Perkins was in acquisition talks with Social Capital, [5] but the acquisition reportedly fell through. [6] In May 2015, Social Capital raised $600 million in their third and largest venture capital fund. [1] PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel praised Palihapitiya's approach, and as of 2015 served as a limited partner. [7] [8]
In 2017, Marc Mezvinsky joined Social Capital as vice chairman as it sought to expand beyond traditional venture capital. [9]
In August 2017, Hamid left Social Capital to join Kleiner Perkins as a general partner and managing member. [10]
In spring of 2018, Mezvinsky departed Social Capital. Later in 2018, then-partners Arjun Sethi, Jonathan Hsu, and Ted Maidenberg left the firm to co-found Tribe Capital. [11]
Social Capital invested in Yammer in 2011, which was later bought by Microsoft. [7] In 2012, the firm invested in Impermium, which was acquired by Google in 2014. [12] Also in 2012, the firm was a venture investor in InstaEDU, acquired by Chegg in 2014. Social Capital led a round of Series B funding for Wave Accounting. In 2014, Social Capital also invested in LotusFlare. [13]
In May 2015, the firm was a leading investor in a funding round for Slack Technologies. [14]
Through 2016 and 2017, the firm began a Discover program which led to several investments in climate-related companies Aclima, [15] UrbanFootprint, [16] and DroneSeed, [17] and space technology companies Swarm Technologies [18] and Relativity Space. [19]
In September 2020, their SPAC IPOB merged with Opendoor Technologies with a market cap of $4.8 billion. [20]
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs in over 900 ventures, including America Online, Amazon.com, Tandem Computers, Compaq, Electronic Arts, JD.com, Square, Genentech, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Nest, Palo Alto Networks, Synack, Snap, AppDynamics, and Twitter. By 2019 it had raised around $9 billion in 19 venture capital funds and four growth funds.
L. John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn. In 2017, related to Forbes, he was recognized the 40th Richest in Tech. Forbes ranked Doerr as the 196th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$ 9.8 billion as of April 12, 2023. Doerr is the author of Measure What Matters, a book about goal-setting, and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Mary Meeker is an American venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst. Her primary work is on Internet and new technologies. She is the founder and general partner at BOND, a San Francisco–based venture capital firm. She previously served as partner at Kleiner Perkins.
Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successful investments include Affirm, DoorDash, Square, Impossible Foods and Instacart.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.
The iFund is a US$200 million capital fund. Developers may enter into equity deals for the creation of applications, services, and components for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad platform. It is being offered and managed by venture capital company Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
Slack Technologies, LLC is an American software company founded in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, known for its proprietary communication platform Slack. Outside its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Slack operates offices in New York City, Denver, Toronto, London, Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, Vancouver, Pune, and Melbourne.
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist, engineer, SPAC sponsor, founder and CEO of Social Capital. Palihapitiya was an early senior executive at Facebook, working at the company from 2007 to 2011. Following his departure from Facebook, Palihapitiya started his fund, The Social+Capital Partnership, through which he invested in several companies, including Yammer and Slack. The Social+Capital Partnership changed its name to Social Capital in 2015. He is a co-host of the technology podcast All In.
Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, Postmates, Thumbtack, Notion, SnapLogic, Opendoor, Clubhouse, Stack Overflow, Bolt, OpenDNS, Yammer, and Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.
Shasta Ventures is an early-stage venture capital investment firm located in Silicon Valley that invests in enterprise and technology consumer startups. It is located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.
Mike Abbott is the Executive Vice President, Software for General Motors. He was formerly the vice president of Apple's Cloud Services team. He also previously worked as a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, vice president of engineering at Twitter, team lead for Azure at Microsoft and senior vice president of apps and services at Palm.
Remind is a private mobile messaging platform that aims to help teachers, parents, students, and administrators in K–12 schools to communicate with everyone at once. The platform has more than 20 million monthly active users across the United States. As of September 2016, Remind is used in more than 50% of the public schools in the U.S.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Lowercase Capital is an American venture capital firm that provided seed and early stage funding for a number of successful startups including Twitter, Twilio, Kickstarter, Uber, Instagram, and Stripe. It raised over $1 billion in capital and sources claim a return of at least $5 billion to its investors.
Eric Feng is an American software engineer, business executive, and financier. He is a former general partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, where he focused on leading early stage consumer investments before leaving in 2018. Previously he was CTO of Kleiner Perkins portfolio company Flipboard, along with other companies.
Mamoon Hamid is a Pakistani-American venture capitalist currently serving as a Managing Member and General Partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. He previously was partner at Social Capital and served as an executive at Yahoo! where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Before that, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and he was CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair.
Opendoor Technologies Inc. is an online company that buys and sells residential real estate. Headquartered in San Francisco, it makes instant cash offers on homes through an online process, makes repairs on the properties it purchases and relists them for sale. It also provides mobile application-based home buying services along with financing. As of November 2021, the company operates in 44 markets in the US.